Landscape photography with kit lens (18–55mm)
Want to learn how to take amazing landscape photography like the one behind this text, but you only got a standard kit lens, fx. the 18–55mm? Keep reading and you’ll learn just how to do so.
Yesterday, i went for a shoot in Stockholm, in the forest. Went down to the water to cast some amazing landscape photography while the sun was going down. All I had with me was my Canon T3I and my kit lens, the 18–55mm lens.
Nothing more than that.
Stockholm is the first city on me and my girlfriends four month travel.
But let’s cut to the chase, how can you take stunning landscape photos with nothing but a simple DSLR and a kit lens?
It’s not the gear
It’s pretty simple… It’s not the gear that takes an amazing photography, it’s everything else. It is what’s in the frame, where the lightsource is, how you position the camera, what the focal length is, the settings and so on.
I’m gonna show you some examples. Down under we have two photos taken within a 10 minute timeframe and with the same lens (18–55mm), but they look very different and have two very different feelings to them.
Focal Length
To make it easy and understandable for everybody, beginners and pro’s — Focal length is the technical word for zoom. In the beginning of this blog, I will be using both zoom and focal length, and then transfer in to only using focal length, since the goal of this blog (18 to 55) is to learn.
The picture on the right, is shot with a short focal length, 18mm, which means that the camera is zoomed out, so you get a very wide shot.
I used a short focal length to make the landscape look big and have the whole landscape as the focus.
Where the left image is shot with a long focal length, 55mm, so it is zoomed all the way in. I used the long focal length to have one object in the image be the subject. In the left image I zoom in to make the sun and the sun rays pop out. That is my focus in that shot.
Really think about when you use a short or long focal length (Zoom in or out), because they have to very different feels to them. The focal length also has an impact on the bokeh effect (amount of blur in the photo), but that is going to be in another post.
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(here they are again)
Layers / Depth
Layers or depth are very useful in landscape photography to make the landscape look bigger and more breathtaking.
In the right image, I have trees in the foreground, and in the left image, there is nothing in the foreground.
With objects in the foreground, you can make the landscape look more dramatic.
Position
As you can see, i didn’t take them from the exact same spot. There is 30 meters difference to the side.
The left one, i’m straight in front of the sun and the sunlight in the water. That helps to make them the center and focus of the shot, compared to when i moved to the left and had the sun in the right side of the frame.
I’m just gonna bring up two different images from the day after. These two images are also taken in Stockholm, but these are from the city center.
Again look at how much the position can change.
Composition
Let’s look at these two images first, now that we are talking about composition.
In the left image, it looks like I took the image right when the whole world stood still. Usually the rule is to take photos using the rule of third (my next blog will be about the rule of third), but in this case it really works, when I place the sun in the center. Try and hold you finger over the sun reflection in the water, and see how the image changes. It doesn’t look as alive and aesthetically beautiful.
Why? Because the sun reflection adds perspective to the image, and perspective is really important for wide shots, to make them look more dynamic and bring life to them. And it also adds depth. It looks more flat, when you hold your finger over it. the sun reflection adds depth and dimension.
The right image has the sun placed after the rule of third, in the top left corner. But it doesn’t look as interesting as the left image. It still works, but they are very different. The left image has more of a feeling that the sun is moving and going down. On the right side of the image, the water is more dark, and the water is more lit up on the left side. Which emphasises that the sun is moving down to the left.
All these things seem very simple, but they have an incredible impact on the photo you get. Just look at the two photos on top. They look very different, but one is just taken one meter higher up than other one.
I’m not gonna get into those photos, but look at them and think about them using the tools I went through in this post. Let me hear your thoughts about what makes these images so different in the comments, and which feeling it creates.
Especially focus point makes a huge difference, but why?
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